Making Intellectual Property Rights more inclusive

👉🏽 This story is developed as part of the Doughnut Economics for Policymakers guide.

Governments can reform Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) systems to better serve public goods and promote inclusion. Strategies include overriding patents for public goods, strengthening standards to prevent patent abuse, protecting traditional knowledge held by Indigenous Peoples and local communities, funding innovation through alternative mechanisms, and promoting open access and Creative Commons approaches. Such reforms can improve public health outcomes, accelerate innovation, support development in low-income countries, advance the green transition, and contribute to biodiversity conservation.

Overview 

The current global IPR system, centred on the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), prioritises profits for multilateral corporations in high-income countries while privatising knowledge. This system undermines collective ways of creating and sharing knowledge, particularly among Indigenous Peoples and local communities who have historically held and shared knowledge openly as public goods. Excessive patent protection impedes innovation, drives up prices, restricts access to essential medicines and climate technologies, hinders development in low-income countries, and excludes communities holding traditional knowledge. 

However, many governments around the world are taking action to ensure IPR systems better serve public goods and become more inclusive by design. Some examples include: 

• Overriding patents for public goods: Governments can authorise third-party production of patented products when public interest demands, using TRIPS compulsory licensing provisions with fair compensation. Between 2011-2016, there were 81 instances globally where governments overrode medicine patents for affordable access. Brazil, China, and India have all advocated for compulsory licensing on climate technologies to overcome access barriers.
• Strengthening patentability standards: Governments can adopt strict criteria to prevent patent abuses. India's Patent Act denies patents on incremental improvements without proven enhanced efficacy, while allowing pre- and post-grant opposition through peer review. Brazil requires Ministry of Health review of pharmaceutical patents for access implications. Argentina has implemented rigorous pharmaceutical patentability guidelines.
• Protecting collectively-held traditional knowledge: India’s Traditional Knowledge Digital Library documents indigenous practices as "prior art," preventing biopiracy. South Africa requires those who benefit commercially from biological resources and traditional knowledge to share profits with knowledge holders and resource stewards.
• Funding research and innovation: Governments can promote innovation through direct funding, R&D tax credits, and innovation prizes: approaches used by many high- and middle-income countries. Global funds such as the Reaching the Last Mile Fund to combat neglected tropical diseases can provide much-needed support for low-income countries.  
• Promoting open access and the creative commons: Many governments require publicly-funded research to remain in the public domain. Governments in over 30 countries support Creative Commons. Few currently require tax credit recipients to share knowledge openly or reduce patent lengths, which represents an untapped opportunity for reform. 

Implementation

The TRIPS agreement established minimum 20-year patent terms for World Trade Organisation (WTO) members, but created flexibilities like Compulsory Licensing that allow national governments to design contextually appropriate IPR systems. However, bilateral trade agreements often impose stricter restrictions, and low-income countries face disproportionate geopolitical pressures and legal barriers when designing their own systems. These countries rely most heavily on accessible knowledge and technology to meet the basic societal needs of health, education, and climate adaptation. 

South-South collaboration can boost open-source and collaboratively shared knowledge while helping shift the global system. Examples include the Africa Digital Compact and collaborations among Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa on shared public priorities including sustainable agriculture and green technologies. These collective efforts by influential Majority World countries create a counterweight to pressures from high-income nations and demonstrate viable alternatives to the current regime.

Impacts

• Social benefits: Compulsory licensing has dramatically improved access to essential medicines. India’s compulsory license for an anti-cancer drug reduced the price by 97%, while the USA denial of patents on naturally occurring genes accelerated innovation and substantially lowered costs for diagnostic tests. India's abolition of pharmaceutical patents has built one of the world's most important generic medicine manufacturing industries, now supplying affordable medicines around the world. 
• Ecological benefits: Reduced patent barriers for climate technologies can accelerate green innovation globally. Documenting and respecting traditional knowledge — as India and South Africa have done — prevents biopiracy and ensures more equitable benefit-sharing from the commercial use of biological resources. This supports biodiversity conservation by recognising and rewarding the stewardship of Indigenous Peoples and local communities who have maintained ecosystem health across generations.

Challenges

• Without fundamental reform of international patent systems, incremental adjustments may prove insufficient.
• High-income countries exert political and economic pressure to maintain the current global IPR system.
• Multinational corporations lobby heavily to shape national policies and trade agreements, protecting commercial interests. They possess far greater resources for patent litigation, creating asymmetric power dynamics. 
• Collective knowledge held as "common heritage of humankind" is fundamentally at odds with existing IPR systems designed to privatise and commercialise knowledge through individual ownership and legal documentation.

Reference and further reading

• The paper Innovation, Intellectual Property and Development: A Better Set of Approaches for the 21st Century (2017) by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Dean Baker and Arjun Jayadev critically examines the current IPR system and propose alternatives. 

• In Indigenous peoples and intellectual property (2025), Laila Barqawi discusses the importance of — and challenges associated with — protecting traditional knowledge.

• Drawing on global examples, Health Action International presents an analysis of opportunities and challenges for EU governments to ensure medicines are more accessible for all while adhering to international intellectual property agreements. 

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